Read On…

In our June issue of BardNotes, I posed four questions to y’all. Three of them were requesting your advice about our blog and some new directions it might take. I snuck in the fourth question, purely for my own selfish purpose. I asked you what I should read this summer.

Summer Reading. (Image: James Brantley)

Thanks to the many, many of you who sent responses to some or all of the questions. They were wildly helpful. We’ll be back in a bit about the blog, but for now . . . the books you recommended! A completely fabulous list. And since many of you said, “Send us the list!” we’re doing just that. In all, 126 recommendations. Data point that is amazing to me: only two titles were recommended by more than one of you. You are a fascinating and eclectic group of readers! Two or three of you recommended All The Light We Cannot See and Americanah.

In this blog post, you’ll find the first half of the list. In our next post, the rest of the list plus a bonus. We got so excited about your recommendations that we decided to ask our squad of summer interns–two undergrads, a recent high school grad starting college next month, and a rising high school junior–for their reading recs too.

We’re having kind of a wild summer here. Hope yours is restorative and big fun.

I rarely see the Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy listed anywhere. Along with anything by Robertson Davies and John Irving, Kirsten Unstead is an author of the characters I have always known but were waiting “between the lines”.